Top Democrat Says Banks Run Congress
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that the banking and financial services industry has an outsized influence in Congress.
Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase each got bailouts of $25 billion in government bailouts last year. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs got $10 billion apiece. And AIG, the mammoth insurer that lost billions in bad derivatives bets, has sucked in more than $170 billion.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is reticent about bailing out an American state — California.
Collin Peterson, Democratic Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, says he knows who to blame.
“The banks run the place,” Peterson told the New York Times in Monday’s editions. “I will tell you what the problem is — they give three times more money than the next biggest group. It’s huge the amount of money they put into politics.”
Peterson has introduced a bill to regulate derivatives trading — the pesky financial instruments that nearly brought down the US financial system. Derivatives involve writing insurance on various complex financial transactions, such as providing insurance to investors in the event of massive defaults on home mortgages.
But he says that Republicans have watered down his bill. He wants derivatives trading to take place on public exchanges — much like the New York Stock Exchange — rather than through private clearinghouses, which are managed by banks.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/banks-run-congress-top-democrat-says.html
photo credit: dianaoctavius
Tags: Congress
